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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780814254585 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Ohio State University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/24/2018 |
| Series: | 21st Century Essays |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 200 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 16.40(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
To travel in search of the past is a well-known fool’s errand, and yet meeting one’s own ghost may indeed offer unexpected strength and splendor. The scattered relics of the past dare the living moment to enlarge itself, so as to encompass transience and loss. In The Odyssey, before Odysseus can find his way home he has to sail to the land of the dead: beyond the stream of Oceanus, to the level shores where the groves of Persephone shed their fruit, and down into the house of Hades. There he digs out a great trench, filling it with the blood of sacrificial sheep, and the dead flock toward him—to drink, and then to speak.
In an emotional reunion between living and dead, his mother, Anticleia, tells him how things have been in his home during the years of his absence. He longs to embrace her, but she flits away from his arms like a shadow or a dream, no longer flesh and bones. The past, like the dead, comes willingly to meet us when we cross the ocean of time. It speaks of things we love, but when we reach our arms to embrace it, it flits away like a shadow or dream.
For a time in my own youth, no doubt as generically sentimental and melancholy as Woolf’s, the Parthenon hovered above my summer landscape. Before Greece was an easy tourist destination, when the back streets of Athens often turned out to be unpaved and the recently constructed Athens Hilton was a daring speculation about the future, my parents were posted to the American Embassy there. With all my life to come, however, the famous ruined temple on its rubble-strewn mount and the vanished world it implied were mostly backdrop to my days on the whitewashed islands, in late afternoon cafés, and along oleander-lined roads toward the beaches. I was never quite present with the old bitten marble of the great temples, or alive to their monumental command.
As memory has it, the guarding of the entrance to the Acropolis was rather easygoing back then, and I’d once walked up in the moonlight with a man I was briefly in love with on the evening before he was to leave Greece. The event seemed unreal, an absurdly romantic situation for the finale to our last moments together. The white nakedness of the past rose above the shadowy guardedness of the present: the man, being older than I was, knowing we would not see each other again; me stumbling in my flimsy sandals on the stones. The national treasure, the ancient patrimony, shone above us on its fortress rock, the object of so much imaginative attention and so many complex desires, like mine on that long ago summer night.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Sailing, Thought Still All These Ages 1
Chapter 1 Partners with the Past 7
Chapter 2 Beauty, Bliss, and Lies 21
Chapter 3 Conversations After Empire 43
Chapter 4 A Patina of Electricity 60
Chapter 5 The Traveler's Dilemma 77
Chapter 6 To Persephone's Island 95
Chapter 7 Out of the Shadows 117
Chapter 8 Art, Archeology, and Restoration at Pompeii 136
Chapter 9 Attuning One's Life to Theirs 154
Chapter 10 The Past Is Always Elsewhere 169
Acknowledgments 187
Works Consulted 189
Illustration Credits 193